The place João Bordalo calls home: Tag economy

Will "Free" be the next business model?

bordalix — Thu, 28 Feb 2008 03:58:00 -0500

Trendwatching report for this month, named "Free Love" points out to ongoing rise of "free stuff", and the new business model of offering valuable stuff in exchange of consumer's attention.

FREE LOVE: the ongoing rise of free, valuable stuff that's available to consumers online and offline. From AirAsia tickets to Wikipedia, and from diapers to music.

FREE LOVE thrives on an all-out war for consumers' ever-scarcer attention and the resulting new business models and marketing techniques, but also benefits from the ever-decreasing costs of producing physical goods, the post-scarcity dynamics of the online world (and the related avalanche of free content created by attention-hungry members of GENERATION C), the many C2C marketplaces enabling consumers to swap instead of spend, and an emerging recycling culture.

Expect FREE LOVE to become an integral if not essential part of doing business.

The extense report gives examples of:

Newspapers;
Magazines;
Telecom;
Airlines;
Car rental;
Food and beverage;
Photo prints;
Student textbooks;
Travel guides;
WiFi;
Navigation;
Stock photography;
Notes and photocopies;
Finance;
Games;
Bikes;
Music;
And more.

So, if you have interests in the future of economics, fill your tea cup and enjoy the article.

Why Joost will loose to Miro

bordalix — Mon, 25 Feb 2008 16:55:00 -0500

Or how homo digitalis is different from the homo connectus.

I recently moved to a farm, in the mountain, far from the next post office. Cable companies don't find it economically attractive, and since the house already had a phone line, ADSL was my last hope. First trials tells me that whatever ADSL I will have, I will never be able to have a good connection.

Currently I'm connected through a UMTS connection, with an average of 500 Kbps speed download, which is fine for reading emails, follow my RSS subscriptions and even make some web browsing, but hard to watch YouTube videos and totally impossible to watch Joost.

I work in a very well connected environment: 3 different cables from 3 different companies enter our premises, in a total of 48 Mbps. During work time, Miro keeps track of my daily shows, and download them, in the background, while I'm running through the day job.

The lesson?

Being digital is different from being always connected. Mankind will evolve to a society where everyone is always connected. That will allow for a constant access to information, peer reviews and collaborative decision making, in real time. Technology will allow for new ways of social interaction, and experiences like My Football Club will expand to other fields of our society. Can someone imagine how politics will be in 20 years? Can someone imagine collaborative politics?

But we are not there yet: technology will need to deliver large bandwidth, everywhere, and the near future is not bright: WiMAX is still a promise, and the first optical fiber networks are being rolled out now, and ready in 5 years. So, Joost will have an handicap to Miro for at least 5 years. In this world of fast economy, the question that arises is, can they afford it?

Bread crumbs, mind the gap

bordalix — Thu, 03 Aug 2006 11:39:00 -0400

First, Pedro wrote on his blog about the most amazing presentation he has seen this year. Well, knowing Pedro as I know, I had to see it. He is very hard to please, so my curiosity was high.

Guys, you must see this: when someone is able to make a presentation on statistics with the entusiasm of a football game, you just have to love it. It was the first time I saw statistic so live and colorful

After this, I went to read more about this guy project, Gapminder, and I have just found my pro bono project for 2007. I will help in it, that's a fact.

Third, and while in the Gapminder website, I realize the tool is available for anyone on a Google service. Did you know that Google as a tools.google.com service? And that it's running the gapminder tool for you to try and explore? Me neither.